The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for determining statistics about the behaviour of a call center at a required past time instant.
Call centers are known in which incoming calls are routed to one of a plurality of agents. For example, the call center might provide help desk facilities for a particular group of products and customers who are able to call in and be allocated to an agent who has the necessary skills to deal with his or her query. Each agent has one or more skills, for example, a particular agent has knowledge about sales for product X and about technical support for product Y. An incoming call is received and information from that call used by the call center, together with information about the agents, in order to route the incoming call to an agent with the appropriate skill. For example, an interactive voice response system (IVR system) may be used to find out what type of agent skill is required. Associated with each skill is a queue into which incoming calls are placed until an agent with that skill becomes available.
The term xe2x80x9ccall centerxe2x80x9d as used herein is not intended to be restricted to situations in which telephone calls are made to the center. Other types of call or contact are also envisaged, such as email, fax, SMS, chat, web access and any other suitable method of contact including conventional telephone calls and voice over internet protocol telephone calls. Similarly, the term xe2x80x9ccallxe2x80x9d as used herein is not intended to be restricted to conventional telephone calls but includes contacts made by email, fax, voice over IP and any other suitable medium.
Typically a call center has many agents, for example, from less than 10 to 1500 or more. Those agents are grouped into teams each team having a supervisor responsible for managing those agents. For example, there might be about 30 agents in a team managed by one supervisor.
Supervisors require information about the performance of the agents and the queues associated with their skills in order to manage them appropriately. Previously this information has been provided in two general forms. Current information in the form of statistics such as queue lengths, numbers of active agents, numbers of idle agents etc. and historical information in the form of aggregate data such as the average waiting time over a 15 minute period or the total number of incoming calls over a 15 minute period. The current information is typically presented to the supervisors at a client machine xe2x80x9creal-time displayxe2x80x9d operated by that supervisor and is refreshed every 5 seconds for example. The historical data can be accessed by the supervisors from their client machines by requesting that an historical report be generated.
Often service level agreements are entered into with particular enterprises whereby the call center provider agrees to ensure specified maximum waiting times for calls of particular specified types for example. Supervisors require the information mentioned above in order to assist in ensuring that service level agreements are met and to make the most efficient use of the call center resources. For example, as a result of analysing the information supervisors can take action such as allocating more agents to a particular skill or sending particular agents for training.
Situations often arise however, in which supervisors need to analyse behaviour in the call center at a particular time instant in the past. For example, if a customer complaint is received about a particular past event. At present however supervisors have no means of accessing information about the state of a call center at a particular time instant in the past. The historical reports only provide aggregate data over a time period such as 15 minutes and the granularity of information as available on the supervisor""s real-time display is not available for the past time instant. For example, a supervisor is unable to identify from an historical report what a particular agent was doing at a past time instant o how long he spent on a particular call, except by resorting to a highly complex manual task of analysing call events from the time instant in the past
An object of the present invention is therefore to provide a method of determining statistics about the behaviour of a call center at a required past time instant which overcomes or at least mitigates one or more of the problems mentioned above.
Further benefits and advantages of the invention will become apparent from a consideration of the following detailed description given with reference to the accompanying drawings, which specify and show preferred embodiments of the invention.
According to an aspect of the present invention there is provided a method of determining statistics about the behaviour of a call center at a required past time instant said method comprising the steps of:
storing sets of values of statistics about the behaviour of the call center at a plurality of time intervals, each set of values being associated with a particular time instant;
accessing information about past events occurring in the call center from an event database;
accessing from said stored sets of values, a first set of values whose associated time instant is a known time from said required past time instant;
extrapolating from said first set of values to an output set of values whose associated time instant is the required time instant, by using information accessed from the event database.
This provides the advantage that a quick and simple method of obtaining statistics about the behaviour of the call center at a past time instant is available. Sets of values of these statistics are stored at intervals, each set of values reflecting what was the xe2x80x9ccurrentxe2x80x9d behaviour of the call center at a particular time. These intervals may be for example every half an hour or longer. In this way, the number of such sets of values to be stored is not prohibitive whilst at the same time it is still possible to extrapolate from those stored sets to a particular time instant.
In a preferred embodiment said step of extrapolating comprises:
initialising a pegging engine using said accessed set of values,
accessing from the event database information about events occurring between the time instant associated with the first set of values and the required time instant; and
processing the accessed information about events using the initialised pegging engine in order to produce an output set of values of statistics whose associated time instant is the required time instant.
This provides a simple and effective way in which the extrapolation process is carried out. The pegging engine only needs to process those events occurring between the times mentioned above and this speeds up the process.
Preferably the method further comprises sending said output set of values to a supervisor terminal associated with the call center for display to a supervisor. This enables a supervisor to quickly and easily view information about the performance of the call center at a particular past time. This is helpful for analysing problems that occurred at a particular time or for dealing with customer complaints and other issues.
In one embodiment the output set of values are for the same statistics as also displayed to a supervisor about the current behaviour of the call center. This provides a user friendly way in which the information is provided to the supervisor. For example, the supervisor is used to viewing particular statistics about the current call center behaviour on his or her display screen. The supervisor is now able to view those same statistics but for a past time instant.
Preferably said first set of values is associated with a time instant prior to the required time instant. In this situation the extrapolation process involves working forwards from the first set of values to the required time instant. This is advantageous because a pegging engine can be used for the extrapolation process where that pegging engine operates in the same manner as a pegging engine already provided in a call center server itself as known in the art.
According to another aspect of the invention there is provided an apparatus for determining statistics about the behaviour of a call center at a required past time instant said apparatus comprising:
a storage device arranged to store sets of values of statistics about the behaviour of the call center at a plurality of time intervals, each set of values being associated with a particular time instant;
a first input arranged to access information about past events occurring in the call center from an event database;
a second input arranged to access from said stored sets of values, a first set of values whose associated time instant is a known time from said required past time instant; and
a processor arranged to extrapolate from said first set of values to an output set of values whose associated time instant is the required time instant, by using information accessed from the event database
The invention also encompasses a call center comprising an apparatus as described above.
In addition, the invention encompasses a computer program arranged to control a call center in order to carry out the method described above.
According to another aspect of the invention there is provided a statistics regenerator for use in a call center said statistics regenerator comprising:
a first input arranged to access stored sets of values of statistics about the behaviour of the call center each set of values being about behaviour of the call center at a past time instant;
a second input arranged to access information about past events occurring in the call center from an event database;
a processor arranged to use the first input to access a first set of values about behaviour of the call center at a past time instant which is a known time from said required past time instant;
a pegging engine arranged to extrapolate from said first set of values to an output set of values whose associated time instant is the required time instant, by using information accessed from the event database.
The preferred features may be combined as appropriate, as would be apparent to a skilled person, and may be combined with any of the aspects of the invention.